For Northampton Junior High, Tommy Conwell Is The Real Thing

For Northampton Junior High, Tommy Conwell Is The Real Thing

April 23, 1988
by Amy Longsdorf, The Morning Call

For 10 weeks last year, 1,320 Northampton Junior High School students and 80 teachers wrote the phrases 'Laser 104.1 FM,' 'Tommy Conwell' and their school's name on 502,024 index cards.

Their common goal: to win a free rock concert by recording stars Tommy Conwell and The Young Rumblers. 

"Not only was it a good school effort," principal Thomas A. Ortwein said, "but it was also a way to get families involved. We even had grandparents helping out." Northampton Junior High students collect their prize Wednesday afternoon when Conwell and the Rumblers take over the school's gymnasium for a 1 1/2 hour show. At the same ceremony, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of the Lehigh Valley's Robert Shaffer will present the school's library fund with a check for $1,104.

The idea for the contest, billed officially as "The Laser 104.1 Coca-Cola School Spirit Contest," began when WAEB-FM program director Jefferson Ward remembered a similar promotional campaign coordinated by Philadelphia's WMMR-FM. The earlier contests, which involved free concerts by Tommmy Conwell and The Hooters, were the brainchild of Steve Mountain, head of Cornerstone Booking, a Delaware Valley talent agency which handles both Philadelphia-based groups. "It's common sense," Mountain said about the contest strategy. "Go to a record store tomorrow. Who's there? It's not 30-year-olds. Its 15- to 17- year-olds."

Conwell, who recently signed with Columbia Records, is said to be on the verge of a national breakthrough. Describing his sound as "more driven, louder, a little wilder than most," Conwell has been a part of the fertile Philadelphia rock music scene for several years. His performance at Northampton Junior High will be one of his first appearances since completing his major label debut LP.

Ward, who decided the contest "would be a neat way to show our involvement with area high schools and to raise some money for a school's library fund," contacted Coca-Cola as a potential sponsor.

"When they asked us if we would be interested, we said yes because it was a way for us to demonstrate our ongoing involvement with youth projects," said Coca-Cola's Shaffer.

After the firm agreed to cover all of the concert's production costs, Ward began an extensive on-air promotion. "Kids got very involved," he said. "I put some of them on the air when they came by the station. We even had a couple of principals on the air." The students were encouraged to drop their votes off at the station and to keep a tally of their weekly submissions.

Even though all elementary and secondary schools in the WAEB-FM listening area were invited to participate in the contest, nothing prepared Ward for the onslaught of final submissions.

"On Nov. 23, the last day of the contest, we must have gotten about one million of the 2.6 million total votes dropped off at once. What these schools had done was to save up their votes and then dump them off on us. Our whole lobby was filled wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling with 3-by-5 index cards. It was nuts."

When Comprehensive Counting Services of Bethlehem tabulated the cards, the results indicated that more than 500,000 votes belonged to the winning Northampton Junior High School.

"We had a real close call," Ward said. "At first we thought that there was only a difference of only 5,000 entries between Bath's Sacred Heart Elementary and Northampton Junior High.

"But the kids at Northampton told us that their running total estimated we were about 20,000 votes off. And it turned out that they were right."

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Amy Longsdorf is a free-lance writer on entertainment for The Morning Call.